It’s also a job that calls for steady legs and a strong stomach.<\/p>\n
Unlike the fixed Jackdaw platform, this installation \u2013 80 miles north west of Shetland\u00a0\u2013\u00a0is a large ship, a floating production, storage and offloading vessel (FPSO) named the Petrojarl Rosebank.<\/p>\n
It’s been chartered by the field’s owners from Aberdeen-based Altera and, during my 48 hours on board, it was constantly but gently rolling on the North Atlantic swell.<\/p>\n
Those conditions may be misleading.<\/p>\n
With the understatement typical of an Orkney islander, lead mechanical technician Ewan Leonard told me the winter weather could be “a bit of a challenge.”<\/p>\n
“Last week we had a 30m heave coming through,” he said, referring to the swell, “so we’ll probably suffer more of that as the winter goes on.”<\/p>\n
Altera CEO Chris Brett told me that in the industry the environment west of Shetland is considered “as harsh as you get anywhere in the world.”<\/p>\n
Whatever your view on that industry, the sheer scale of what humans have achieved in such conditions is impressive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s also a job that calls for steady legs and a strong stomach. Unlike the fixed Jackdaw platform,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":813043,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-813042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=813042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813042\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/813043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=813042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=813042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=813042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}